Side Gallery

For the sixth time, the New York based Gallery Friedman Benda invited a guest curator to propose an exhibition. For the 2019 gallery edition, Omar Sosa entitled the show Comfort. The co-founder of Apartmento magazine, chose pieces from both modern and contemporary designers including Side Gallery’s Guillermo Santomà.

The exhibition was designed to examine comfort and discomfort, and how this contrast of conditions drives human behavior. The show presented a combination of unitarian objects, sculptures, photographs and paintings creating a visual landscape that encouraged engagement from the viewer. Comfort investigated comfort’s relationship to aesthetics and the tension that occurs when an object can be physically uncomfortable but visually pleasing, and vice versa. Sosa strived to investigate beyond the physical state of the phenomenon, but to present it as a complete sensorial experience through artistic interpretations. Normally perceived as a positive quality Sosa challengd the conception, stating that “Most of the time comfort is against feeling, when you're in your comfort zone you feel less, less pain or fear but you also feel less pleasure”, Sosa’s message was, that if we just do things in a new way, eventually we will find a new form of pleasure.